Political ecology and the Foucault effect: A need to diversify disciplinary approaches to ecological management?

Abstract

While explicitly Foucauldian analyses have declined in recent years in the social sciences, Foucault’s ideas continue to strongly influence scholars’ approaches to power, governance and the state. In this article, we explore how Foucauldian concepts shape the work of political ecologists and social scientists working on environmental management, multispecies ethnography and the Anthropocene – often in an unrecognized way. We argue that – regardless of whether or not Foucault’s work is explicitly cited – his legacy of linking scientific projects, population management and state control continues to have an outsized impact on thinking in these fields. It is time, we assert, to directly consider how such theoretical inheritances are affecting the shape of political ecology, in particular, and the social sciences, more generally. How, we ask, are Foucauldian traditions at once enabling and constraining more-than-human scholarship? In this article, we explore the contributions and limitations of Foucauldian approaches in environmental contexts through empirical attention to trout introduction and management efforts in South Africa. Our overall aim is to call for a deeper conversation about how scholars working on environmental topics engage the science-governance nexus. The article ends with proposing landscape, as a material enactment of more-than-human politics, as a useful analytical category to this end.

Complexities of multispecies coexistence: Animal diseases and diverging modes of ordering at the wildlife–livestock interface in Southern Africa

“…Finally, regarding our approach to the materials that informed our analysis, our study departs from traditional Foucault-inspired studies of knowledge and power in that – besides stressing the way in which science is used to control populations – we also consider how knowledge practices may constitute practices of care. Crucially, as our case demonstrates, science does not always work in the service of the state, and neither state nor science is unitary in itself – posing a challenge to the tight association between knowledge and (state) power (Nustad & Swanson, 2021). Scientific knowledge, as others have argued, may also simply be driven by curiosity or care (Cassidy, 2019; Tsing, 2015; Van Dooren, 2014).…”

Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance

“…Yet, just as digital encounters are not necessarily spectacular, digital technologies are not always involved in hegemonic biopolitical governance. A phenomenon akin to 'the Foucault effect' (Nustad and Swanson 2021) prevails in critical scholarship, denoting a tendency to label all uses of digital technologies to govern as oppressive biopolitical techniques. While digital technologies are often used in surveillance contexts, they can also generate other, potentially positive, possibilities.…”

“…The concept of environmental data justice offers a powerful lens to challenge the extractive logic of environmental policies and produce fair and participatory data practices (Walker et al 2018; Vera et al 2019). Examples include community-based counter-mapping initiatives that use drones and aerial imagery to illuminate land grabbing and resource extraction within Indigenous territories (Radjawali and Pye 2017), and strengthen the claims of Indigenous groups "regarding specific environmental liabilities and justice issues” (Paneque-Gálvez et al 2017, 86). Equally, organisations like the Arctic Eider Society (2021) and the Digital Indigenous Democracy platform are combining Indigenous epistemologies with earth observation, sensing, and communication technologies to promote community building and Indigenous participation in environmental governance (Young 2021).…”